1994

Digital Camera

If you think about a traditional film camera, it can be a pretty simple device. A pinhole camera is a sealed box with a piece of film inside and a tiny pinhole in the box to let in the light that forms the image.

A digital camera, on the other hand, is a combination of electrical engineering, computer engineering, and software engineering.

The world’s first consumer digital camera is arguably the QuickTake, introduced by Apple Computers in 1994. And this was very probably the first year that engineers could have produced it at anything like a reasonable price. It was incredibly simple by today’s standards, but had all of the essential elements. A CCD (charge-coupled device) sensor recorded a color image. An internal microprocessor could read the image off the sensor and store it in internal flash memory, which was just appearing in the marketplace. The camera could take 640 x 480-pixel color images, and the flash memory could hold eight of them. The camera’s computer also operated a small liquid crystal display (LCD) and managed a serial interface to read out the images.

The idea of memory cards for cameras started later in 1994 with the CompactFlash standard, and really took off in 1999 with the introduction of much smaller SD cards.

The key element is the image sensor, either a CCD or CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensor. Each pixel on the sensor can measure light intensity. Engineers use one of two systems to capture color information. The less expensive and therefore more common option is a bayer filter mosaic over the pixels on a single sensor. Every other pixel has a tiny green filter over it. The remaining pixels get red or blue filters. The internal computer interpolates to arrive at an RGB value for each pixel in the image. The other way is to split the incoming light from the lens into three beams. One beam goes through a green filter, the second through a red filter, and the third through a blue filter. These three beams hit three separate sensors, and the computer creates RGB values from them.

Since this first camera, engineers have radically improved every part of the digital camera. Image sensors now have tens of millions of pixels. Memory cards are measured in gigabytes. The internal computers and software can do amazing things.

SEE ALSO LCD Screen (1970), Microprocessor (1971), Flash Memory (1980), Smart Phone (2007).

A woman at a computer viewing a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge taken with Apple’s QuickTake 100 camera.